Gela’s heart, how awful if that was true! One set of eyes, one single being, all alone, picking up one mask after another, putting it on for a while, then throwing it away again to try another.

I ran out of the Circle.

‘Mary? Mary? Are you still there?’

‘Of course I am, dearest, I’m right here.’

And there she was, her solid shape appearing out of the fug.

‘I’m so sorry, Mary, but I still can’t hear her, and I don’t dare stay there any more because all kinds of bad thoughts are coming to me. All kinds of bad thoughts and doubts.’

She didn’t hug me this time, but she took my hands and stood there for a moment looking into my eyes: me and Mary alone there, surrounded by nothing but the softly glowing fug.

Twenty-one

Once we saw a single tree with shining white flowers, much much taller than the whitelantern trees you see in forest. It was standing by itself at the bottom of a valley of snow, and steam was rising from its airholes towards the stars. It was the only tree we’d seen the whole way across.

‘That’s the Crying Tree,’ said Tom, and I remembered Mary telling me the same. When John Redlantern’s people came this way, the story went, they’d seen a big bat the size of a child, standing right at the top of it. As the bat looked around and cooled its wings, the way bats do, a long long slinker had come out of one of the tree’s airholes and begun winding up round the trunk towards it. But suddenly, for no reason, John Redlantern had started to shout and cry out, and the bat had heard him and jumped into the air to fly away just before the slinker reached it.

We had a similar story on Knee Tree Grounds, but our story came from Jeff, while it was Wise Mehmet who told the story to the Davidfolk. Mehmet always said, apparently, that this was the moment when he first properly admitted to himself that he’d been a fool to put his trust in Juicy John.

We looked down at the tree, alone in its bowl of light, and carried on back into the darkness, baby Suzie’s thin weak cry carrying on all the while.